I just ran into this and thought I'd share it with you guys. Looks like Egypt has gone "dark". The government has ordered all internet providers and cell carriers to shut down internet service. http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450

And they're still down. I'm reasonably sure that they've taken the record now for both length and breadth of outage. I also see conflicting accounts on whether the ISP behind their stock exchange is still up. If that's down long, they'll start doing themselves some serious economic harm here shortly.

Well, from a certain perspective, I imagine that "some catastrophic cyber attack" might very well include massive protests that were critical of the government, which would certainly have a cyber component. This seems to be the case in Egypt, and I wouldn't discount it happening elsewhere.

I'm quite sure that preventing civil unrest would be plenty of justification for the use of such a tool in the name of public safety.

Dude, I was just thinking the same thing. (something out of a Daemon novel) It's been going on a while now. Crazy! At least some of them are keeping connected by landlines, fax machines, ham radios and dialing international numbers vai dial-up modem with their cell phone. Also, Noor Group is still standing strong against shutting down their service. Good to see Anonymous is helping out: http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2 ... -to-egypt/